Earlier this year I was attacked by many for a
review of Beau Travail, Claire Denis¡¯ overwrought adaptation of Herman
Melville¡¯s Billy Budd. I still stand beside my feelings even as the
film makes a great deal of top ten lists lately -- Denis has a great deal of
ability as a visual artist, but she lets the film get out of hand and hampers
the story while doing so.
Now comes the second Melville adaptation of the
year. Pola X, based on the novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities
(the name Pola comes from French title Pierre, ou les
Ambiguites and the X comes from the tenth draft of the script) is
another story about people dealing with the torture of young souls with adult
themes. It¡¯s always interesting to look at the more mature novels that Melville
wrote after the deep but family friendly Moby Dick. Like all of
Melville¡¯s works, Pierre, or the Ambiguities looks at people that do
not know how to react to the lemons that life has thrown at them.
In the case of this novel in the form of Pola
X, the lead character is Pierre (Depardieu), who is a relatively well-off
aristocrat living in Normandy. His father was a diplomat in France -- a
respected diplomat at one time before everything came tumbling down in the years
following World War II. Now Pierre and his widowed mother Marie (Deneuve) live
in a lush château where he can write his novels under the pen name 'Aladin' and
prepare to marry his beautiful cousin Lucie (Chuillot).
But everything he knows comes to an end one evening
as he rides his motorcycle to inform Lucie of the recently determined wedding
date. Over the course of the last couple days, a female figure had appeared in
his dreams and watched him from afar. Now, on the side of the road is this dark
haired street vagrant. Stopping to learn why she has haunted his life as of
late, he learns of a great story: she is his half-sister. Her name is Isabelle
and their father had impregnated her less noble mother and left them in the
past.
With this information, Pierre decides that it is
imperative that he take her away with him to Paris where she can be his muse,
leaving Marie and Lucie behind. Since they had to leave the only hotel that
would allow her to come in after an unfortunate occurrence, they set-up a
makeshift residence in an abandoned warehouse that has become the home of a
group of terrorist as of late.
Pierre acts as if Isabelle is his wife, even having
sex with her on occasion (this is not too far a cry for his older lifestyle --
he and his mother had pseudo-sexual relations). Since his Parisian cousin
Thibault (Lucas) will not welcome him into his life, Pierre has no choice but to
become a recluse.
But Pierre does not write the novel that he hopes
to write with her there, in fact he becomes a bit of a has-been. As time and
sudden poverty withers away his once virile body, he begins to fight more for
his life than for his novel -- which is meant to be more personal than his
successes and is instead seen as plagiarism and he is accused of being an
imposter.
The digression of Pierre is astonishing, probably
the best thing about this film. His early moments are so young and lively, but
his later moments are near frightening. It¡¯s like Brad Pitt in Legend of the
Fall turning out like Stellan Skarsgård in Breaking the Waves
within the limits of a two hour film. Depardieu is not what I¡¯d consider to
be a great actor, but his ability to make this metamorphosis was absolutely
astonishing.
In the fourth of the five films that Catherine
Deneuve has released this year in North America, the great French actress once
again shines. Even when her scene is relegated to making an apropos seductress
out of her maternal figure, there is an astonishing amount of grace that she
has. Her endurance, both in her characters and as an actress, is one of the
greatest testaments to why she has stood the tests of time.
She is merely the third female supporting player,
and arguably the least important of the three. Delphine Chuillot gives an
understated and beautifully challenging performance as a woman scorned by the
love of her life and unable to comprehend the actions that she is constantly
present to. The other supporter, Katerina Golubeva, on the other hand, leans
towards utterly annoying. Her cloying performance is one of the downfalls of the
motion picture.
Director Carax did an incredible job directing
Lovers on the Bridge in 1991 (the film had a small engagement in
America last year) where he built a replica of the Pont Neuf. That artistry
seems a little lost here. I really think that Carax knew where he was going but
did not really know the exact way to bring it to the screen.
The passion is non-existent -- something that made
Lovers on the Bridge so astonishingly beautiful. I¡¯m not trying to
sound like some perverted old man here, but there really is no passion, no
realistic conception to the film¡¯s main sex scene. I would normally have taken
it as less than passionate due to its story matter, but the lurid precision of
Carax¡¯s vision only confines the film to a one-note sex scene.
Carax sets this film in 1950¡¯s France, a far cry
from the 1852 setting for the novel. Yet he still sets most everything close to
the original story. Much of what happens is an exact facsimile of the novel with
motorcars and motorcycles abound. In other places he might have been considered
yet another literature to cinema revisionist. I personally thought that Michael
Almereyda did a far superior job on his New York 90¡¯s based Hamlet, but
I respect Carax¡¯ Pierre, or the Ambiguities in its own flawed little
way.
From Cinema-scene
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